The old warez cracking scene had an outsize impact on computer security. GRSecurity, Heartbleed vulnerability, most reverse engineering tools for security, etc. etc. etc.
There's so much history here, touching on all sorts of insanity including selling 0-day to the US government that was then used to apprehend high-level Al-Qaida personnel, random warez busts leading to people taking oversea jobs, etc. etc. etc.
If anyone still has old .NFO archives from 1990-2000, I'd be very interested in getting as many as possible.
It's so easy to bait me with this nostalgia. There is something mysterious and enjoyable about dialing-in or connecting to a server in the unknown. During those days, many things were not easily discoverable which added to the fun.
For a brief time, this extended to the early internet with IRC servers. I spent most of my early teenage years downloading warez, .wav music files, and trying not to be a n00b on #c while asking n00b questions
Now that I am an old man, I wonder what today's youth do that is equivalent to this fun nerdy culture? Maybe I can partake, LOL.
They do it on Discord now, witch their crackling voices on full display in Voice Chats. I was on an Arch Linux discord and one kid hopped in with a voice changer (was maybe 15) because he didnt want people to make fun of him for being a squeeker.
I remember a period of time where my computer was too slow to play MP3 but it could play WAV files. So I'd process a song from MP3 or similar to WAV and play it that way.
yeah, I sought out 96kbps mp3s because I could listen to those and still use my computer without too much lag. 128kbps was enough to really bog things down lol >_<
My first foray into Linux was because it could burn a CD without errors (when reniced) while doing other things; the same computer under Windows had to be absolutely left alone when burning or it would make a coaster.
Kids these days with their multitasking and interfaces!
Oh wow I totally forgot about that -- leaving the computer alone while burning a CD because even the slightest action might render your burned CD a coaster! Actually, that period lasted quite a while, as I remember quitting programs to reduce issues when burning even in WinXP... lol
I worry that the sad truth is that there isn't anything similar for "kids these days". But hopefully there is something fun and deep like this for the youths in the AI world that I'm just too old to know about.
I hope one day someone will make a movie about the warez scene. The only piece of media we have as far as I'm aware is The Scene (2004–2006) which I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with a love for moving bytes around illegally.
It's watchable, but not great. It unfortunately doesn't cover many of the most interesting details, such as what happened with TPB after the operators were arrested.
It's quite interesting to see just how much of that historically proprietary and copywritten software from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s is thoroughly outcompeted today by FLOSS solutions that are simply available to anyone at no cost whatsoever. A very high fraction of the proprietary "utility" programs of old (with a huge amount of wasteful duplicated effort involved in their creation) are even made completely redundant by OS-level features in free operating systems. We live in the best era for "warez" of sorts, and it's all completely legal!
Such fond memories. So many OS reinstalls after inadvertently
infecting my computer from a sketchy photoshop crack. You learn to never get too attached.
Same, I think at one point I was reinstalling my (pirated) copy of Windows 98 SE at least once a month. In hindsight I should have pirated Norton Ghost as well.
From an archival perspective... it's sad to be able to search the filelists for software that's probably lost to history. For example, I've been trying to track down a (working) copy of SAS for DOS since forever. Even software from fly-by-night houses can tell us so much.
man, those were the days!
I was a coder for an amiga crew in australia, we had a heap of bbs's going and we'd phreak calls to scene BBS's in europe, usa & eastern aus. Amazing what mischief we'd get up to with a usrobotics hst modem ha :D
Those really were the good old days. My BBS ran out of my parents’ attic, with two phone lines and Renegade on the server (on a beefed-up PS/1). It was pure magic.
That's how I learned computer security, learned how IIS would allow specific commands, which paths Windows would not show, etc. Very interesting.
That's also, maybe more importantly, how I learned about information propagation and even epistemology because you HAD to 1st in order for your work to be valuable.
A lot of fun, of lot of learning still valuable decades later.
My interpretation was/is that they're both right. The word originated as 'wares with a Z' but once it was spelled that way it became natural to pronounce it 'ware-ez' but nobody thought you were unintentionally mispronouncing it. The in-joke continued on certain boards as 'warez' became 'Juárez'...
It absolutely is pronounced "wares" as in "software" but 13 year old me didn't know that so I and everyone I knew pronounced it "war-ezz", as in "warfare".
There's so much history here, touching on all sorts of insanity including selling 0-day to the US government that was then used to apprehend high-level Al-Qaida personnel, random warez busts leading to people taking oversea jobs, etc. etc. etc.
If anyone still has old .NFO archives from 1990-2000, I'd be very interested in getting as many as possible.
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